Landscape Stewardship Corps

Interns help maintain parks and adapt them to climate change

For Autumn Davis, an intern at Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Georgia, being able to put conservation training into practice immediately on a scale as large as a national recreation area “is a real cool, unique opportunity.”

NPS / Isabelle Bracewell

Autumn Davis replaces invasive vegetation with native plants and helps curb erosion at Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Georgia. Kennedy Little cares for a historic apple orchard at Yosemite National Park in California. Nick Jackson tends venerable vegetable and gravesite gardens at Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in New York. Erick Contreras maintains grounds and machinery at Hampton National Historic Site in Maryland. Jacob Martin tests spring water and keeps up trails at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

The Landscape Stewardship Corps “reflects the intrinsic value of preserving both the natural environment and the cultural heritage of these places,” says Kennedy Little, an intern at Yosemite National Park in California. “These trees specifically, I think, are like nature’s storytellers.”

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They are doing this work as part of the National Parks Service’s Traditional Trades Advancement Program Landscape Stewardship Corps. The corps, supported by the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Conservation Experience, is composed of 35 interns at 19 National Park sites. The interns, age 18 to 30, work 26-week stints helping to preserve, conserve, and beautify historical and cultural landscapes on National Park lands. They help maintain infrastructure and adapt parks to a changing climate.

“I love cultivating. I love nature. And I love giving back to nature because nature gives so much to us,” says Nick Jackson, an intern at Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in New York. “This was an opportunity to learn a lot without having to go to school.”

NPS / Kaela Mitchell

At the same time, corps interns learn cultural landscape preservation-related traditional trades such as horticulture (fruit, vegetable and ornamental plant management), arboriculture (tree management), turf care, masonry, and monument preservation or carpentry — trades in high demand within parks and beyond.

“It's a fairly niche element of the job market where you're combining preservation, landscape maintenance and design, some construction, and then putting a historic lens over all of that. It’s an interdisciplinary field,” says Claire Finn, the National Park Service (NPS) manager who oversees the corps. “Teaching young people early in their careers about these opportunities and giving the training and skills so that they can become our next generation of employees who care for these spaces through climate change is critical."

The goal is “to preserve the very feeling you get when coming here, the one that tells you, ‘Oh this place has hundreds of years of history behind it’,” says Erick Contreras, an intern at Hampton National Historic Site in Maryland. “The program has changed my life forever.”

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The Landscape Stewardship Corps is one of five youth and young adult programs supported by the Inflation Reduction Act that help fortify NPS sites in the face of a changing climate. The other four are the Community Volunteer Ambassador Climate Cohort, Scientists in Parks, the YMCA Partnership, and the Pacific Islands Conservation Corps.

“It’s been awesome,” says Jacob Martin, an intern at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, “to work with the National Park Service in a place I grew up in … I’m learning a lot of incredibly valuable work skills.”

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About the Inflation Reduction Act

The Inflation Reduction Act provides the National Park Service with an historic opportunity to address critical ecosystem resilience, restoration, and environmental planning needs. Projects funded in national parks represent broad-scale and impactful resource investments across every corner of our nation—from Alaska to Florida to Maine. 

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